


colder than a steel blade

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Gen, More warnings inside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-22 23:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4854671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They’re abominations,” Tomas says, loudly. (Rachel agrees.) “Godless, sin-filled homunculi, making a <i>mockery</i> of God’s children.”</p><p>“But I’m not,” Rachel says.</p><p>Tomas lets out a sharp angry breath through his nose. Margaret glares at him, for a second, and says, “No, Rachel, you’re not. That’s why we need you. It’s your purpose – your holy mission – to eliminate these copies.”</p><p>“I’m <i>twelve</i>,” Rachel spits back. </p><p>(Or: what if Rachel was raised as the religious assassin, instead?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	colder than a steel blade

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: abuse (specifically child abuse), murder, torture, animal death and dissection, dissociation, attempted sex with a minor]
> 
> This isn't necessarily compliant with [Project Leto](http://archiveofourown.org/series/243907), but there's nothing saying they _can't_ be taking place in the same universe.

They wake her up at a time that is neither night or day but is some strange, bleeding middleground. They tell her to put on her best dress and brush out the untamed tangle of her hair – someone is coming for her, she is leaving the orphanage, she is going home. 

Rachel blinks, and follows orders. She rolls the word over in her mouth to figure it out as she yanks the brush through: home, home, home. Why? The other girls in the orphanage cry, sometimes, and talk about how they want a mommy or a daddy. Rachel doesn’t want one of those. All they seem to do is pat your head and give you sweet things – and she’s never loved sugar. She can get by on her own; she doesn’t need someone to help her. The only reason she’s here at the orphanage is because they give her food and a roof over her head. She’s smart enough to know about survival. But she’s also smart enough to see through the idea of _family_. 

But it turns out she needn’t have thought too hard about it: _family_. Because the man and woman who are picking her up from the orphanage – her short and bright-eyed as a butcherbird, him tall and lumbering like a collection of fists – aren’t pretending to be her mother and father at all. 

She’s almost grateful.

(This will be one of the few things she will ever be grateful for, when it comes to Maggie and Tomas.)

The woman helps her into the backseat of the truck and they drive away, just like that – Rachel could wonder if this is how it’s supposed to be done, but mostly she doesn’t care. She switches back and forth between watching the world stream by outside and watching the woman in the front seat watch her. (The man is driving; his hands on the steering wheel are clenched tight. Does he even want her? But if he didn’t, why come for her in the first place?)

“Hello,” says the woman, finally. “My name is Maggie, and this is Tomas. I’m sure this must be very frightening for you, Rachel,” (it’s not) “but—”

“Don’t coddle the child, Margaret,” snaps the man whose name is Tomas. “Just – tell her.”

Maggie – Margaret – sighs, but hands back a collection of photographs. “We need you, Rachel,” she says softly. “You’re special. You have a purpose.”

Rachel holds the photographs up to the window, to see them better in the light. When the subject of the first photograph is clear, she fumbles and almost drops all of them. It’s a picture of her, only it isn’t – she wouldn’t smile like that, wouldn’t wear her hair like that. It’s not her. Her first thought is _sister_ , and even that makes her stomach roll: she doesn’t _want_ a sister, doesn’t want someone else to know her, doesn’t want to have to share her life with anyone.

But she flips through the photographs, and – it can’t possibly be just one girl. There are several of them, with different haircuts and different smiles. Something burns hot in her chest and works its way into her throat, like the slow spread of poison. She’s – she’s _furious_. How dare they. All of them with clothes and lives and smiles and here is Rachel, sitting in the back of a truck, forced to watch their lives from the outside like a child looking at life through a window. Some little match girl she is. If it was up to her, she’d burn them all in a great big fire. Right now. 

“They’re all copies of you,” Margaret says, and Rachel finds space in her to hate Margaret too: it’s like she thinks Rachel can’t see what she’s doing, being the good cop to Tomas’ apparent bad. (There is a small part of Rachel that is whining _she isn’t even British_ , but that isn’t a good reason to hate her. What’s the point of hate, if it isn’t _based_ in anything?) But most of her hatred is focused on the photographs she is flipping through, over and over again. They’re copies of _her_. They were made from _her_. Their lives, their smiles and the wrinkles in their foreheads – it all belongs to _her_.

“They’re abominations,” Tomas says, loudly. (Rachel agrees.) “Godless, sin-filled homunculi, making a _mockery_ of God’s children.”

“But I’m not,” Rachel says.

Tomas lets out a sharp angry breath through his nose. Margaret glares at him, for a second, and says, “No, Rachel, you’re not. That’s why we need you. It’s your purpose – your holy mission – to eliminate these copies.”

“I’m _twelve_ ,” Rachel spits back. 

“We’ll teach you,” Margaret says soothingly. “We’ll give you all the tools you need, so when the time comes…”

“You want me to kill them for you,” Rachel says, shuffling through the photographs over and over and over again. “You can just say that you want me to kill them for you. I’ll do it.”

Margaret looks at Tomas. Rachel watches, tries to figure out what the woman is feeling. Fear? Is it bad, how much Rachel wants to rip these other girls apart and break them and beat them and hurt them until they stop pretending they’re anything like her? Disappointment? Was there a test she failed, was she supposed to thank the two of them for trying, was she supposed to praise Tomas’ god? Approval? Did she do well?

Rachel watches for these emotions like watching fish flicker behind the glass of a fish tank, but grows bored with the attempt and goes back to the photographs. Wonders where they came from, for a second, before growing bored with that too. Does it matter? Does any of it matter? What matters is that she has been pulled from her life so that she can correct someone else’s wrong – so that she can be the ones to erase the (what was the word) _homunculi_ wearing her face. She’s glad. That’s the strongest feeling, the only one she can identify: she’s _glad_ , savagely so. The thought of someone else knowing what she looks like dying makes her sick. The thought of someone else eliminating these things, without them knowing what they’ve done – a circle left incomplete – makes her sick sick sick.

Oh. That’s what the look on Margaret’s face was. She was _sick_.

The lights flicker on Rachel’s face through the window. She files this away for future reference.

* * *

They tell her to shoot a dog. She does.

They tell her to shoot people, so she does that too. No hesitation. No weaknesses. She likes it: the power, the way one small piece of metal can change the world as long as your finger doesn’t shake on the trigger. She likes it, feeling like a god.

(The night after she shoots the dog she sneaks out, into the night – Margaret and Tomas asleep in their beds, far away from the basement they’ve put Rachel in as some form of _penance_ – and finds the dog’s body, where they’ve left it on the ground. She doesn’t yet have a knife, but her fingers are small and quick. She pulls it open and looks inside.

It’s pink and gross, curves of muscle she doesn’t think Margaret or Tomas will ever teach her the names for. The word that comes to Rachel’s mind is _vulnerable_. She shudders, once. Wipes her hands on the grass. That’s how it works, she thinks. These guts are what being vulnerable looks like, and these guts make her want to vomit. They’re sick. So that’s what being vulnerable is: sick, sick, like being pulled apart by the unshaking fingers of a child.)

She does everything perfectly. It doesn’t matter – they punish her anyways. They lock her in a cage and they starve her and they hit her and they become _clumsy_ in their anger – especially Tomas, with the anger sparking in his eyes like a lighter. Like the beginnings of a fire. Whenever they try to hurt her Rachel goes deep deep inside herself, in the blank white room in the back of her brain. In the first few months she is there she has to close her eyes, but that just makes it hurt more so eventually she keeps them open. It doesn’t matter what nasty things they say, how cold it is outside of the bars of that _stupid_ cage. Inside of Rachel’s head there is Rachel, standing there on her own two feet in the middle of an empty space. 

It’s white. She breathes. Her body, on the outside, is still; her eyes are empty. If she ever looked in a mirror she would perhaps notice that they’re emptier than any of the doubles’.

But she doesn’t look in a mirror. So she doesn’t notice.

Years pass, and Rachel grows taller – years pass, and Rachel grows angrier. You wouldn’t think it, to look at her; on the outside she is so very still. Her fingers are precise on the sniper rifle, precise on the knife that Margaret gives her as if it’s some sort of wonderful gift. She’s learned so much from Margaret and Tomas, but mostly she has learned that to wear anger on the outside of your skin is to be inexcusably sloppy, is to have everyone think less of you. So instead of lashing out, beating her hands against the bar of the cage, she stands on her own in the blank white space that is the inside of her head and she _screams_ , over and over again. She screams about Margaret and Tomas, she screams about the doubles who are getting _older_ out there – who are stealing more seconds, who are moving through the world bleeding black ink over blank pages that should be entirely Rachel’s own. She screams when she can’t complete a test quickly enough, when the hair she cuts short with a knife doesn’t come out precisely even, when she is cold and when she is hungry and when she has had _enough_.

But then she stops. She always stops. She always grows calm, again, and the center of herself has always been blank and white and empty. She can’t leave until she’s _ready_. She can’t return Tomas and Margaret’s hospitality until she’s _ready_.

When she is ready, it really doesn’t take all that long.

* * *

(She’s disappointed in herself, at her inaccuracy.

She’d known Tomas would beg her. She didn’t realize Margaret would, too.)

* * *

( _Please, Rachel, stop. Stop. Rachel – Rachel_ please _– Rachel, I—_

Stop. Rewind.

She was right, by the way. That’s _exactly_ what vulnerability looks like. Blood and guts.

Play.

 _Please, Rachel, stop. Stop. Rachel—_ )

(It’s warm in her chest, like a fire. She hadn’t thought it would feel like much of anything; she’s disappointed in herself for that too, for the fact that she didn’t know. Didn’t realize. But mostly she’s filled with a slow, uncurling love: love for herself, for how patient she was, for how worth it the whole thing was at the end. Every piece of brutality filed away, neatly organized – tucked away behind her liver, in the space across from her heart, anywhere there was room – only to be remade into something beautiful, a beautiful revenge. Oh, she almost wishes someone was there to _see_.

But she stops. She considers. No. This isn’t anyone else’s. As all of the best things in this world are, this is only hers.)

* * *

She burns down the building, afterwards. Margaret and Tomas are done screaming but she can hear other people howling, pathetic cries of misery and horror. She could stop to help them. She could lift buckets of water, she could wring her hands and weep alongside them and their losses of livelihood.

But stopping to think about it, she doesn’t actually care. So she keeps walking. Her hair, sharp and straight as a knife, swings dark around her face. She’s holding a bag filled with files. Inside of it, also: the blade of the knife Margaret gave her. The hilt of it she’s left behind to burn. She doesn’t care about making the knife safe to hold; she doesn’t care about the sentiment behind the wooden carving, she doesn’t care about what lamb’s-clothing that wolf tooth might wear. 

All she cares about is the blade.

Good riddance.

* * *

The first thing she does with her new freedom, stinking of smoke as it is, is buy a map. The second thing she does is trace the path from where she _is_ to where she _should be_ , with the same calm finger that once pressed itself to a dog’s heart to see if it was still warm. She has to cross the ocean, to get to Europe proper. She knows she doesn’t have nearly enough money for that, and the idea of stowing away on a ship – _hiding_ – fills her with disgust. She’ll have to manage.

The third thing she does is walk into the grandest hotel she can find, like she owns it. She can feel the eyes of the people around her landing on her and then sliding off, like they’re afraid. She wonders if it’s because she smells like smoke. Maybe it’s only that she’s radiating it, the dregs of the joy she’d felt before. ( _Please Rachel please Rachel please Rachel oh God Rachel please God Rachel God Rachel God Rachel Rachel Rachel please_ ) She doesn’t care. She steps in the elevator, rides it all the way to the top. The lock on the door is easy enough to pick, and she’s in the penthouse suite. There’s a bank of floor-to-ceiling length windows, on the other end of the room; the light’s streaming through them, falling to the floor in one endless bright collapse. Rachel spares the glass one sharp flicker-glance, and then drops the bag and moves through the room. It smells clean, sterile, unknown. She’s never been in a hotel. She was so young when they took her, and when they took her they shoved her underground. How dare they. She was always meant for higher heights; she was never meant to be hidden away in the dark. _This_ is what she deserves: the cold clean air, the city sprawled out below her like a body that doesn’t know it’s dead yet. Rachel watches the movement of a single car along the road, far below, and thinks about maggots.

When she steps into the bathroom, the first thing she sees is the mirror.

It’s not as if she hadn’t seen her own reflection – Margaret and Tomas didn’t keep mirrors near her, wouldn’t let her see herself, but there are always reflective surfaces around. Rachel knows herself well enough: her bullet-eyes, her knife-hair, the vague shape of her body. But this is different. This is clear, and crisp, and she can recognize her surprise in her eyes – the widening of her pupils, the slight droop of her mouth. She steps closer. That’s her body, that’s her body, that’s _her body_. (Rachel remembers the copies, for a moment, and the world goes white and Rachel screams and then she shoves the whole thing aside. Not now.) She watches the way her collarbones twitch when she swallows and feels an unimaginable tenderness. This is hers. Margaret and Tomas tried to take it from her, tried to hit and hurt it, but it’s hers.

Rachel peels off the top she’s wearing, quickly, shucks the rest of her clothes like a snake shedding skin. She eyes her own body in the mirror, watches her stomach swell and deflate with her breathing. She trails her fingers along her arms, down the curve of her ribs, curling around her thigh and between her legs. She watches her mirror-self’s eyes droop, slightly. She’s close enough now to see the way her pupils are growing. It’s the hungriest her eyes have ever looked – here, in this room, watching herself _touch_. Abruptly she grows frantic; she scrapes nails along the outside of her thighs, hard enough to draw stark red lines from her skin. She grabs at the folds of skin at her stomach, scrapes her hands up, claws at the space above her ribs, slaps her hands against her skin over and over before wrapping them around her own breasts. Stands there in silence as the angry red marks slowly fade. Her body looks the same as it did before. Her body looks _perfect_ , unscarred, immaculate. She drops her hands to her sides, stands on the balls of her feet. Meets her own eyes in the mirror. 

Then she smiles.

* * *

She leaves the hotel room quickly, after a shower that’s long and hot and luxurious, after she sleeps in the middle of the starched clean bed and after she’s stolen the fruit from the fruit bowl and eaten it. After that: she leaves, walks down the street. She stops in front of another hotel; through the glass of the window she can see a room full of couches, a long bar stocked with glittering bottles. There’s a long line of men sitting at the bar, all slouched over and tired. She wonders what the point of it is, why you’d sit at a table like that and drink – whatever it is they’re drinking. It seems like a waste of time.

But: one of the old and tired-looking men sees her through the window, and his eyes go wide. He winks. He’s too far for Rachel to see, to be able to tell whether or not his pupils were as wide as hers were. Still. He’s almost drooling, inside, and so Rachel lets a smile trickle around the edges of her mouth and stays where she is. 

He gestures her inside. So she goes inside, sits next to him like she belongs there. 

“Hello there, sweetheart,” says the man. He gestures to the woman standing on the other side of the bar, tells her to get Rachel a drink. Rachel’s eyes unfocus for one small moment (she doesn’t know what to do she doesn’t know what to _do_ and she hates this man for not knowing she needs his help and she hates this man for the help he could give her, if she asked for it, and she hates him and she hates the woman standing there waiting for her to say what she wants and she hates Margaret and she hates Tomas and) (she could slit this man’s throat in twenty-seven seconds, give or take, with the knife she’s slipped into her waistband) (she could kill him and it wouldn’t even matter) (it wouldn’t) (matter) before she lets her eyes skip to one bottle on the shelf, skip back. She raises her eyebrows and the woman skitters off to pour her a drink.

“What’s your name, honey,” says the man.

“Rachel,” she says. She wants to say it again. _Rachel_. It’s been so long since she’s said her own name; she’s forgotten the way it rolls off her tongue, the soft pressure of her tongue against her teeth on that last syllable. _Rachel_. It’s a beautiful name, because it’s hers. 

She’s given a glass, filled to the brim with something dark red. She takes a sip to test it. It’s sharp and sweet and sour. She takes another sip. There’s a space hanging in the air where she should ask this man his name, but she doesn’t fill it. Her mouth tastes like fruit, like last year’s harvest gone rotten.

“And how do you like the city, Rachel?” he asks. He’s very close. Was he this close before? She doesn’t know. 

“How do you?” she tosses back, before taking another, longer sip. He laughs like she’s said something incredibly funny. But she _hasn’t_ , she hasn’t at all, she—

Oh.

Oh, he _wants_ her. Rachel looks at him sideways, through her eyelashes, and considers him. He’s looking at her like he’s hungry and all he’s ever wanted to taste was her skin. He’s almost _drooling_ and Rachel feels something warm in her stomach. She’s beautiful, and he knows; she can see herself reflected in his gaze, and she dazzles herself. Slowly, she uncrosses and recrosses her legs. 

“Honey,” he says, lowly (his eyes are so dark), “how old are you?” and Rachel realizes she doesn’t know. 

(How long has it been since she was twelve? Four years? Five years? Seven? When she met Margaret and Tomas she didn’t have breasts, and now she does. When she met them she didn’t bleed, and now she does. Twenty-two? Sixteen? Twenty-four?)

She’s stayed silent for too long, lost in her own curious attempt to work out her own age, and the man next to her darts his tongue over his lips in a way she thinks is _nervous_. “Well,” he says, “let’s say twenty-one.” He looks at the woman who’s pouring drinks further down the bar. Then he looks at Rachel.

Rachel blinks, once, slow and easy. She takes another sip of wine. Her whole body is warm – every inch of it, her perfect body, warm and thrumming with joy.

* * *

It turns out he has a room in this hotel. Rachel likes both him and his room very much, until he tries to touch her.

* * *

( _Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel Rachel_ please _—_

 _Yes, okay, whatever you want, please, please, please, Rachel, please, Rachel, Rachel, please, Rachel—_ )

* * *

His clothes are far too big on her, but her old ones are…stained and so she’s forced to get rid of them. In exchange for the clothing she takes all of the bills she finds in his wallet, and the bright squares of plastic alongside them. She’s guessing they’re something you use to get more money – she’s still furious at Margaret and Tomas for not teaching her things like this, _practical_ things, instead of how to survive being thrown in a dog crate for two days. That knowledge will never be useful, if she can help it. 

She buys new clothes the next day – lingers in front of the mirror, smoothing her shirt down over and over again, feeling the way different fabrics cling to the curves of her body. She’s learning which places to touch, which ones make her shiver and make her mirror-self get a look of wide-eyed delight. She leaves the stores with black clothing shoved into her bag, crumpling the faces of the copies further. (Good riddance.) She leaves the stores dressed in all black, like a knife that doesn’t need a sheath at all. 

* * *

The cards do, in fact, allow her to get more money. Rachel buys a place on a ship.

* * *

In her cabin, she sits on the bed with her legs crossed and lays out pictures on the bed. She can feel small tremors running down her shoulders; it’s wrong, she knows, to wear this anger on her skin, but after all this time she is still angry and she is still sick. Her face her face her face _her face_ looks at her or in her direction from all those photographs, and she can eat and drink and lay hands on her own skin but it’s only when all the photos are of _her_ that she’ll be satisfied. She trails her fingers over their faces. It’s just as sick as the inside of an animal, something that should never see the light of day. 

She separates them into two piles – the copies in Europe and the copies not in Europe. One is much larger than the other, but she has to start _somewhere._ She lays out the former pile. Danielle Fournier, hair curled and shaggy like a dog’s, kissing a girl outside a brick building. Janika Zingler, holding a knife like she has any right to knives at all and grinning over the corpse of a deer. Katja Obinger, head turned towards the camera so that it picks out all the spikes of her mohawk. All of them with their vacant expressions, all of them worse than Rachel. _None of them_ deserving what they’ve been given. Rachel lays out photographs, more and more, until she’s only holding one. That one she puts in the middle, considers it.

She doesn’t know how Veera Suominen got burned. She doesn’t care. What matters is that Veera has scarred Rachel’s face, twisted and deformed it. It’s worse than the other thieveries. It always has been, ever since Rachel first saw Veera’s photograph. Of all of them she has always hated Veera best.

There is a page in the file with _Veera Suominen_ written in Margaret’s spiked, cramped handwriting. Next to that: _Helsinki, Finland_. An address. A school. A series of numbers and letters Rachel doesn’t know. She gets out her map, and works out how to get to Finland.

* * *

It takes her longer than she’d like. The cards keep spitting out money, though, so she doesn’t have to pull the same trick again. She walks, she rides trains. In every new place there is someone who thinks she is beautiful, someone who watches her like she’s the savior Margaret and Tomas assured her she would be. In one town she slams a woman’s head against the headboard until she stops moving and cuts her hair herself in the woman’s bathroom. In a city whose name she doesn’t remember she makes a man say _Rachel_ until his throat goes hoarse and the both of them are panting for breath at the sound of it. In a different city, someone else says _Rachel_ and _please_ and then doesn’t say anything at all.

She reaches Finland, and then she reaches Helsinki. It’s an enjoyable trip.

* * *

The first time she sees Veera, she spends so long inside her own brain that she loses her again. When she blinks herself out of the white room Veera is gone and Rachel is still so angry she can’t quite breathe through it. She wants to rip Veera open with her fingers and pull out everything that makes her herself, take it for her own. She wants to unmake this girl so desperately she can’t breathe through it. But she sits in a hotel room and strokes her hand along the underside of her breast, lets her fingers lightly slip down her stomach, below the dip of her hips. _Patience_ , she whispers to herself, and she remembers the way Margaret had said _please_. It will be worth it, of course. It always is. 

 _Patience, Rachel,_ she breathes, alone in the dark, the lights of the city outside barely visible through the window-glass. _Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Ra—_

* * *

She dreams about it – what it will be like. She never remembers the dreams, only wakes up with her hands tucked against her skin and her fingers curling and uncurling with a sort of curious joy. Sometimes she slams their heads against the floor until they look like old, rotten fruit. Sometimes she straddles their hips, takes the knife and _shoves_. Sometimes she leans in close and says _you’re ugly, you’re so ugly, you’re so very ugly_ over and over until they cry. The dream’s never the same. Unlike all of them.

The only part of the dream she always remembers is this: after it’s done, there’s a pool of blood on the ground. In the dream Rachel’s feet are always bare; when she walks away, she tracks a neat pool of red footprints across the blank white of the ground. It’s like rewriting her story, writing the story that it always should have been. Each step another letter in bright red ink.

Once upon a time there was a girl.

* * *

She follows Veera for days, works out when she goes to school and when she goes home and when the best time is for Rachel to make everything right and good and perfect. At night Veera goes to sleep and Rachel breaks into another hotel room, lies there in the dark and unfolds another story. Once upon a time there was a girl. They took her rib and they made more girls from it, but they were all fake. Nobody else could tell, but the girl knew they were all fake. In this story she is the snake, the apple, the tree. In this story she is God. In this story she has always been God, but nobody wants to open their eyes and realize it.

That’s alright. Rachel is so very patient. She learned patience from sniper rifles, corpses and the drip of water outside of a cage. Eventually the bullet leaves the gun. Eventually the maggot starts eating. Eventually, they are stupid enough to let you out and then – and then you strike.

So that’s what she does. She waits, and waits, and then she strikes.

* * *

When Veera wakes up she screams. Rachel watches with a dull sort of interest from across the room, where she’s pulled out a collection of knives – the knife she’s been carrying, of course, but also the ones she’s found in Veera’s kitchen. There are all sorts of sizes, big and small and sharp and curved and blunt. She’s in awe at the sheer variety of knives. But Veera screaming is a distraction – the ugliness of her face ripples and remakes itself around her open screaming mouth. Rachel’s glad she saw one of her copies doing it: screaming. She’d never want to scream like that, but if she didn’t she’d always be curious about how it looked.

The answer is disgusting, by the way. Vulnerable and sick and wrong.

“Stop,” Rachel says, and Veera’s head whips around. She’s tugging at her restraints uselessly – Margaret taught Rachel to tie knots, telling her stories about snakes that Rachel no longer recalls.

(That’s a lie. The snake comes down from the tree, and says: _open your eyes. Stain your fingers red. Be ashamed of what you are; God is coming, to cast you out of the garden._ )

“What the fuck,” Veera breathes, “are you my sister,” and Rachel doesn’t even realize she’s crossed the room but then she’s slapped Veera in the face, across the burn that ripples across her skin. Oh, that’s disgusting. She’ll need to wash her hands after this.

“No,” Rachel says. “I am _not_. You were grown in a lab, like a virus. You are a copy of _me_.”

“You’re insane,” Veera says, the whites of her eyes big and round, “let me go, oh god, let me—”

Rachel reaches behind her and grabs a knife. It’s one of the small curved ones. She presses it to the edge of Veera’s chin, right where the scar ends. Veera stops talking.

“How old are you,” Rachel whispers, and watches with interest as tears start dripping down Veera’s face. It’s like watching a trainwreck. She can’t look away, from that almost laughable show of fear.

“The same age as you,” Veera whispers, and Rachel presses the knife down harder. A slow bright drip of blood starts along the edge of the blade.

“Seventeen!” she yelps. “I’m seventeen, okay, please, god, let me _go_.”

Seventeen years old. Seventeen. Seventeen. Seventeen. 

“Shh,” Rachel says. Veera stops talking; she’s still blubbering, her chest shaking just enough for the knife to tremble. It’s not Rachel’s hand that’s trembling. Rachel’s hands have always been so very still. “Don’t say _God_ , Veera. God is just as fake as you are.”

(They’d tried, you know. They’d tried to make her believe. They’d tried with pretty words, and they’d tried with belts, and they’d tried with the cage. The only thing Rachel has ever believed in is herself.)

(In this story—)

“My name is _Rachel_ ,” she says. “Say it.”

“Rachel,” Veera says, “ _stop_.”

Rachel presses the knife down harder. “Again.”

“Rachel,” Veera says. “Rachel, fuck, Rachel – _stop_ , please! Rachel!”

“Again.”

“Oh fuck, oh shit, oh g—oh Rachel, okay, Rachel. Rachel.”

Rachel nods, softly, her teeth sunk into her lip. Underneath her, her double babbles on: _Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, Rachel_. Their eyes are both wide, their pupils dilated. Their reasons are very, very different.

 _Rachel, Rachel, Rachel_. Rachel watches Veera’s mouth move, watches her mouth move, and then she presses the knife down and slits her double’s throat.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be your nightmare mirror  
> Do what you do to me  
> I'll be your nightmare mirror  
> Colder than a steel blade  
> -"Demon Kitty Rag," Katzenjammer 
> 
> Really, I love the whole song for this fic. It's some good, fitting stuff.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you liked! :)


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